Quick Fix 46: Mysteries within Secrets

[---]

Shh let's not talk about that. I was worried that you would end up lynching yourselves and since Pyro, Sart and I were voting on a JP there was a chance of either killing both of you or the same one, giving Korathi the win

19 minutes ago, Mist said:

Silber voting on himself was great

 

Edited August 4, 2020 by Illwei

[Mist]

1 minute ago, Illwei said:

Shh let's not talk about this I was worried that you would end up lynching yourselves and since Pyro, Sart and I were voting on a JP there was a chance of either killing both of you or the same one, giving Korathi the win

Nice.

[+Lotus]

39 minutes ago, Mist said:

 

It felt fairly balanced. Two games at once was a bit tricky. It was quite fun. Doc contains more of my random thoughts. 

 

I may or may not have been very much enjoying your thoughts written at the end of the Jerski doc.

[Coffeecat]

ILLLLLLLWEEEEEEEIIIII!!!!!

WE FAILED!

 

i composed a march in your Honor!

 

I trust you!

I wont falter!

I wont give in!

I will sacrifice!

and We will win!

 

how did we failLLLLL!LL!L!L!L!????

 

it was fun, no worries.

[Mist]

1 hour ago, Elbereth said:

I'd love to hear from people in the Jeskeri doc what their thoughts on the voting style were - would it have been better to be explicit in-doc-at-the-time votes? No reveal of who voted on whom at all?

I think it's interesting that the Cultist numbers were so predictable that the JP could be fairly confident when they'd found the last one in the doc. If I were to run this again, I might consider just making it a completely open setup ala MU, in which the exact distribution between alignments is publicly known. Or maybe not, I don't know.

One last thing I'm curious about is PMs. PMs being closed would have made this a vastly different game, I think, and still an interesting one (though a bit sad for the Korathi) - I think if that particular change were made, I'd take out the Korathi Cultist. (Idea that I haven't fully thought through at all: what if the Jeskeri knew each others' identities but had no doc to discuss and had to rely as much on the main thread as the Korathi? What if they had no doc but could PM - but only one-on-one? I don't know!)

 

Overall, I think this was a success, and it definitely deserves a rerun. I'd consider running it as a QF again, but I'd also like to see what would happen if I put it in a MR and added in a few simple roles to make things more interesting. So be on the look out for that, and thanks for such a fascinating game!

I think the reveal [edit: of doc votes] was important. Leaving them anonymous during-cycle was fine. Part of the reason the Cultist numbers were easy to tell was the ratio. With 9 people in a game, there's not many ways to change the ratio. Changing amount of communication could definitely work[edit: or be interesting], although it's nice to have someone to talk to while you are being hunted [edit: and somewhere to share your true opinions.]

31 minutes ago, Lotus said:

I may or may not have been very much enjoying your thoughts written at the end of the Jerski doc.

I'm glad!

Edited August 4, 2020 by Mist

[Elkanah]

This game was really fun! I needed a chance to get back on an elim team and this was the double elim which is the most elim I've ever been!

It was such an interesting and delicate balance having to keep my enemies alive. There have been a lot of games where two factions had a hidden one among them (MR12 comes immediately to mind), but none this seamlessly balanced. Losing to the Korathi as soon as the JPs were gone meant we couldn't allow any mislynches. We needed to Korathi lynch only Korathi and JP lynch only JPs. We got lucky more times than we deserved as the cultists.

Did Striker, Bard and Mist have a secret pm where you were coordinating? I'm really pleased I was able to change Mist's mind at the last minute, but Striker and Bard had my number. Well done you three! We only needed that one more lynch and it was over. Great job getting rid of Hael as well. Also, Thank you, Drake, for keeping the doc active. You truly were too dangerous to keep alive.

Now that I've gone through the JPs. Here are some honorable Korathi. Congrats to Pyro for winning and living! After claiming cultist, you were the last person I'd have guessed to survive the game. Sorry for killing you so early, Straw. Those personalities I'm sure would have been great! A mention to Kasimir, who terrifies me. It's a good thing you weren't trying too hard or the game might have been a lot shorter. Also Gears. I'm going to have to watch out for you going forward. 

Kudos to my fellow cultists. We fought so hard and got so far, but in the end it didn't even matter. But seriously though, I loved my team. It had just the right amount of experience and a measured amount of riskiness. Thank you for putting up with me and my obsessive math.

All in all, I think everyone played a good game. I look forward to the rerun

Oh, I know it must have been rough being a pleb Korathi, but any abilities would have made this a completely different game, and I liked it how it was.

[DrakeMarshall]

Good game, all.

Faction games are always interesting, and this was a rather well done blend of faction and conventional elim strategy.

It came really close to the end, with an outcome which I absolutely did not expect. @Practitioners and in particular @Mist you guys did a really great job of weeding out the Cultists after my death. @The Young Pyromancer you have my thanks for smiling upon our cause  And congratulations on ending the game as the last one standing. As to my fellow Jeskeri of a more Cultish persuasion, you fought well.

Now for some retrospective about the game setup, because I really can't resist examining a setup like this:

Spoiler

• Having less people in each faction made the setup a bit more susceptible to chance. Things like the activity levels of a specific player whose vote might make a big difference, or the RNG tiebreakers when the numbers were close, contributed more to the course of the game then they usually would. Which, I think is ultimately okay. We were running pretty close to the minimum number of players for this setup, and I think that minimum was sensibly chosen.
• It's very possible I haven't examined the permutations of this setup enough, but I kinda think the Jeskeri Inquisition being able to target anybody might be a good idea? I dunno, it seems like the Jeskeri of both stripes will very frequently want to lynch a Jeskeri anyway... But I do think it's a bit harder on the Practitioners, if they can confidently identify the Korathi Cultist, but can't act on it directly. Whereas the tools put in the hands of the other two factions (Korathi Inquisition and Cultist Kill) can always be used to kill the enemies of that faction unilaterally, unlike the Jeskeri Inquisition. It's a fun dynamic, certainly, but I do think it's kind of puts them at a disadvantage, where it's maybe harder for them to win without help from another faction.
• I completely didn't notice that the different factions' win cons were technically compatible, earlier on in the game  At least to me, that was an interesting twist to discover in the final stages of the game.
• You made an original faction game setup which had good enough balance that it got down to 1v1v1 while each faction was still actively trying to win against the others. @Elbereth that is very impressive. On the whole I think this was a quite well put together game.

 

[Ashbringer]

I had a lot of fun here as well, even though I managed to get lynched (for the first time) and killed on cycle 2 (for the second time... fingers crossed the pattern breaks for the LG).

So a bit of story time: end of cycle 2, lynch is tied between me and @Illwei, and at exactly 12:00 for reset Illwei PMs me claiming the Korathi Cultist and not wanting to die. Unfortunately by the time I read it the cycle had locked and I couldn’t have changed my vote if I had wanted to... which I was somewhat considering. Fortunately, I died () and that made this a very interesting game, and I had some fun being the only one who believed the claim in the dead doc for a while .

...

...

*Realization*

@Elbereth... did you actually flip a coin for that tie, or did I get sacrificed by the GM to keep the Korathi Cultist alive? 

 

In other news, I learned that reading TJ’s alignment or Sart’s intentions are both almost impossible, as all three of us turned out to be Korathi. Go figure.

[Mat]

3 minutes ago, Ashbringer said:

I had some fun being the only one who believed the claim in the dead doc for a while .

I actually believed it the second I died, and rooted for Illwei the rest of the game.  

[---]

Ahaha it was fun reading through the spec doc and seeing
"Illwei told me they were the KC" and everyone constantly going
"yeah, but they're probably lying" 

Also yeah I definitely meant to send that PM earlier, but It took me a good 5 minutes to remember what number game it even was (before realizing that it said in the browser tab)
I was freaking out when I wrote that message you could probably tell lol

And I really didn't mean to start a lynch on Mist, I just figured I needed to say things...

[Kasimir]

Thanks for running the game, El! I had fun I agree about the difficulty with the Korathi informational situation, in a nutshell, with regard to identifying cultists or Jeskeri. But I think I've said enough about it

Thanks to Pyro and Illwei (sorry) for winning this for us. I always like it when someone else does the hard work in a game

@Matrim's Dice Indeed, nothing like putting aside divisive suspicion and banding together just so they could strike us down But I'm still glad we corrected our reads of each other in the end.

Really enjoyed reading all the strategising in the Jeskeri and Cultist docs. Y'all be scary

Sorry @Elkanah for obsessively fixating on you after C1 but I appreciate getting killed. I think the pace of the game wasn't really doing me any favours. And I enjoyed reading your strategising

I think I'm moderately happy with how I fared this game. I used to have a major problem with getting perspective and with making sense of seemingly non-rational Village behavior. I still had issues reading Sart, but overall I'm glad I worked out TJ and Mat and revised my views on Pyro. Thanks for calling me on it, Meta and Hael, back when

See you folks in another game sometime

[Ashbringer]

43 minutes ago, Illwei said:

Ahaha it was fun reading through the spec doc and seeing
"Illwei told me they were the KC" and everyone constantly going
"yeah, but they're probably lying" 

Also yeah I definitely meant to send that PM earlier, but It took me a good 5 minutes to remember what number game it even was (before realizing that it said in the browser tab)
I was freaking out when I wrote that message you could probably tell lol

Yeah, or “Illwei claimed KC to somebody” and I just go “ME!”

And yeah, I could tell... which is the main reason I did believe it. Although I’m not sure if I would have committed last-minute suicide to keep you alive, but it definitely would have been an interesting next cycle...

[---]

4 minutes ago, Ashbringer said:

Yeah, or “Illwei claimed KC to somebody” and I just go “ME!”

And yeah, I could tell... which is the main reason I did believe it. Although I’m not sure if I would have committed last-minute suicide to keep you alive, but it definitely would have been an interesting next cycle...

my thoughts were that if you did commit suicide then cool, if you didn't then nothing would change, and if I ended up dying me revealing wouldn't matter anyways because people would know lol

[Mist]

The Korathi Cultist kept me more focused on the thread.

[The Young Pyromancer]

...

Oops. 
I meant to tie that...

Can someone do some rng to see what would have happened if I DIDN’T mess up?

[Ashbringer]

5 minutes ago, Illwei said:

my thoughts were that if you did commit suicide then cool, if you didn't then nothing would change, and if I ended up dying me revealing wouldn't matter anyways because people would know lol

Yeah, it was definitely a good call on your end, even if it didn’t change anything. It’s just a weird decision on my end, as I didn’t/wouldn’t know if you were telling the truth, or if you were a panicking JP desperate to decieve.

Plus I have the added incentive to, you know, not be dead 

[Gears]

13 minutes ago, The Young Pyromancer said:

Can someone do some rng to see what would have happened if I DIDN’T mess up?

I'm splitting it into 3 outcomes based on who would get lynched.

Scenario 1: Pyro is lynched, Mist is elim killed, Korathi-Cultist win.

Scenario 2: Mist is lynched, Mist is elim killed, Korathi win.

Scenario 3: Illwei is lynched, Mist is elim killed, Korathi-JP win.

Now 3 more outcomes if Illwei had managed to submit the kill switch in time.

Scenario 1a: Pyro is lynched, Pyro is elim killed, game continues for another cycle, Korathi lose. Lynch is tied 1-1, Cultist kill on Mist. 50% JP and Cultist win, 50% just Cultist win.

Scenario 2a: Mist is lynched, Pyro is elim killed, Korathi-Cultist win.

Scenario 3a: Illwei is lynched, Pyro is elim killed, JP win.

There are six possible worlds. In 4 of the possible worlds, the Korathi win. In 3 of the possible worlds, the Cultists win. In 2.5 of the possible worlds, the JP wins. In 3.5 of the possible worlds, there is a group win. Excluding the Illwei switch scenarios, there are 3 possible worlds. In 3 possible worlds, the Korathi win. In one possible world, the Cultists win. In 1 possible world, the JP win. In 2 possible worlds, there is a group win.

[The Young Pyromancer]

That’s assuming all of the outcomes had an equal chance. I tried specifically to minimize the odds of the second set of scenarios happening.

[Young Bard]

Thanks El for running a great game. I enjoyed working my brain up in knots about I know that the Cultists know that we know who the Korathi are, etc. Twice the IKYK's, twice the fun!

And I had a PM with Striker, but it was very short (I never made one with Mist) - I started a PM the cycle we lynched Hael - interestingly, Striker was actually the candidate I was second-most suspicious of at that moment, but something about the Drake lynch, and then Hael trying to lean on a Striker lynch, gave me a bad gut read, and made me decide to switch. Once we had a confirmed Cultist, it was much easier to draw connections to the others - with 4 players, you didn't really have the leeway to distance - Hael was tied to Elk, and Elk was tied to Illwei, and Silber was just the odd one out in the JP doc. In a slightly different world where the flip had gone the other way and Hael wasn't lynched, then the Cultists would have managed to win (and they nearly did anyway).

And this game is just weird. Whenever I think about a specific faction, I go "Oh, yeah, this game is so biased against that faction, they have all these disadvantages"... Except I think that about every faction and they can't all be true. I think the Practitioners probably had the easiest job out of the three, but not by a whole lot - I actually mentioned to El before the game the possibility that a Cultist would just share the names of some Practitioners with a Korathi, making it impossible for the JP's to win. If I were a more chaotic/brave player, I might have claimed Cultist to a player and started giving fake reads or something to reduce the effectiveness of that technique.

[Elkanah]

9 hours ago, Young Bard said:

And this game is just weird. Whenever I think about a specific faction, I go "Oh, yeah, this game is so biased against that faction, they have all these disadvantages"... Except I think that about every faction and they can't all be true. I think the Practitioners probably had the easiest job out of the three, but not by a whole lot - I actually mentioned to El before the game the possibility that a Cultist would just share the names of some Practitioners with a Korathi, making it impossible for the JP's to win. If I were a more chaotic/brave player, I might have claimed Cultist to a player and started giving fake reads or something to reduce the effectiveness of that technique.

Haha, yeah, the cultists could have run away with the game if we didn't have to keep the practitioners alive. That was the hardest part.

[Elandera]

Congratulations to both the Korathi and the Jeskeri Practitioners for rooting out all of the cultists! A huge thanks goes to Elbereth for taking on such a unique faction game. It was good to see it work out so well! It would be interesting to see it run again with a few tweaks as El discussed.

As always, if anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, please get ahold of Wilson, Devotary of Spontaneity, Elbereth, Araris Valerian, or myself, or post in the GM Signups & Discussion Thread. Not only will we get you added to the list, but we'd also be more than willing to help out in any way we can. 

You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone in our Art of Game Creation thread. With all the games that we've run so far, we have plenty of experienced GMs that can help you refine any game you're thinking about. If you would rather keep some detail secret, or are self-conscious about posting in thread (there's really no need to be; while we do slaughter each other, we are very polite about it), then I'm sure one of our fantastic committee members (Amanuensis, STINK, Sart, Fifth Scholar, Straw, Haelbarde, and Young Bard) would be more than willing to help you out in private.

Thanks again to everyone that played, and we look forward to killing seeing you in future games!